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by jedieaston 2454 days ago
Interestingly, this is not the first time that I've heard Microsoft talk about open-sourcing Windows [0]. The licensing behind many of the components may make it a distant pipe dream, but since they make most of their money through their applications (i.e. MSSQL runs on Linux now, the software teams all work under Azure now), I could see it happening sometime.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/microsoft-open-source-windows-...

1 comments

They could open source the Windows kernel, and it wouldn't change anything.

Just like OSX is based on Darwin which is Open Source, and Android is based on Linux, that doesn't provide any more freedom for users or encourage interoperability.

The users could at least fix the bugs and document the APIs better (via reading the code) than it's currently done on MSDN. Sounds like free labor for Microsoft BTW.